Dividing the Land: Time and Land Division in the English North Midlands and Yorkshire

Griffiths, Seren

doi:10.1017/eaa.2021.48

“…Landscape divisions known as Celtic fields indicate open grazing and heathland landscapes; we could use the distribution of such Celtic fields to get a sense of the timing and coverage of open landscapes. Additionally, we could compare long-term chronologies of various forms of land divisions, such as seen in the work of Griffiths et al (2022), with heath vegetation developments. In the Netherlands, there appears to be a 2500-year-long gap between the vegetation recorded in Early Bronze Age barrows and the heathlands known from historical records and in the plaggen system.…”

Section: Points For Potential and Future Explorationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anthropogenic Heathlands in Prehistoric Atlantic Europe: Review and Future Prospects

Ombashi

¹

,

Løvschal

²

2022

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Heathlands are unique cultural landscapes that once existed across vast stretches of northern Europe. Their deep-time persistence has formed an intrinsic part of economic and cultural practices. Such a complex interaction requires interdisciplinary approaches, including archaeology, across multiple regions to fully grasp all its aspects. The authors of this article review how research has been conducted in prehistoric heathlands across six nations in north-western Europe and outline the heaths’ general characteristics. They discuss the major issues in that research, namely recurring narratives derived from history, an overall absence of consideration of the cultural aspects of heathlands, and a paucity of cross-regional initiatives. They suggest a series of theoretical and methodological approaches to improve this situation across expanded geographical and temporal scales.

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“…the death of an individual, the decline of artefact type A, the blooming of artefact B and the introduction of artefact type C. Cross-referencing events between different elements in the model is a powerful tool that allows a single likelihood to be evaluated over a range of prior information [e.g. 67 ]. Extensive use of cross-referencing does however remain computationally challenging and it can be necessary to duplicate posterior estimates using the OxCal function Prior, which allows the same likelihood to be sampled multiple times [ 65 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dividing time—An absolute chronological study of material culture from Early Iron Age urnfields in Denmark

Rose,

Meadows

2024

PLoS ONE

0

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Chronological frameworks based on artefact typologies are essential for interpreting the archaeological record, but they inadvertently treat transitions between phases as abrupt events and disregard the temporality of transformation processes within and between individual phases. This study presents an absolute chronological investigation of a dynamic material culture from Early Iron Age urnfields in Denmark. The chronological framework of Early Iron Age in Southern Scandinavia is largely unconstrained by absolute dating, primarily due to it coinciding with the so-called ‘Hallstatt calibration plateau’ (c.750 to 400 cal BC), and it is difficult to correlate it with Central European chronologies due to a lack of imported artefacts. This study applies recent methodological advances in radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modelling, specifically a statistical model for wood-age offsets in cremated bone and presents the first large-scale radiocarbon investigation of regional material culture from Early Iron Age in Southern Jutland, Denmark. Dated material is primarily cremated bone from 111 cremation burials from three urnfields. The study presents absolute date ranges for 16 types of pottery and 15 types of metalwork, which include most of the recognised metalwork types from the period. This provides new insights into gradual change in material culture, when certain artefact types were in production and primary use, how quickly types were taken up and later abandoned, and distinguishing periods of faster and slower change. The study also provides the first absolute chronology for the period, enabling correlation with chronologies from other regions. Urnfields were introduced at the Bronze-Iron Age transformation, which is often assumed to have occurred c.530-500 BC. We demonstrate that this transformation took place in the 7th century BC, however, which revives the discussion of whether the final Bronze Age period VI should be interpreted as a transitional phase to the Iron Age.

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“…the death of an individual, the decline of artefact type A, the blooming of artefact B and the introduction of artefact type C. Cross-referencing events between different elements in the model is a powerful tool that allows a single likelihood to be evaluated over a range of prior information (e.g. 79). Extensive use of cross-referencing do however remain computationally challenging and it can be necessary to duplicate posterior estimates using the OxCal function Prior, which allows the same likelihood to be sampled multiple times (B-R 2009: 351-2).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Dividing Time – An Absolute Chronological Study of Material Culture from Early Iron Age Urnfields in Denmark

Rose,

Meadows

2023

Preprint

0

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Chronological frameworks based on artefact typologies are essential for interpreting the archaeological record, but they inadvertently treat transitions between phases as abrupt events and disregard the temporality of transformation processes within and between individual phases. This study presents an absolute chronological investigation of a dynamic material culture from Early Iron Age urnfields in Denmark. The chronological framework of Early Iron Age in Southern Scandinavia is largely unconstrained by absolute dating, primarily due to it coinciding with the so-called ‘Hallstatt calibration plateau’ (c.750 to 400 cal BC), and it is difficult to correlate it with Central European chronologies due to a lack of imported artefacts. This study applies recent methodological advances in radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modelling, specifically a statistical model for wood-age offsets in cremated bone and presents the first large-scale radiocarbon investigation of regional material culture from Early Iron Age in Southern Jutland, Denmark. Dated material is primarily cremated bone from 111 cremation burials from three urnfields. The study presents absolute date ranges for 16 types of pottery and 15 types of metalwork, which include most of the recognised metalwork types from the period. This provides new insights into gradual change in material culture, when certain artefact types were in production and primary use, how quickly types were taken up and later abandoned, and distinguishing periods of faster and slower change. The study also provides the first absolute chronology for the period, enabling correlation with chronologies from other regions. Urnfields were introduced at the Bronze-Iron Age transformation, which is often assumed to have occurred c.530-500 BC. We demonstrate that this transformation took place in the 7th century BC, however, which revives the discussion of whether the final Bronze Age period VI should be interpreted as a transitional phase to the Iron Age.

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Dividing the Land: Time and Land Division in the English North Midlands and Yorkshire

Cited by 4 publications

References 34 publications

Anthropogenic Heathlands in Prehistoric Atlantic Europe: Review and Future Prospects

Anthropogenic Heathlands in Prehistoric Atlantic Europe: Review and Future Prospects

Dividing time—An absolute chronological study of material culture from Early Iron Age urnfields in Denmark

Dividing Time – An Absolute Chronological Study of Material Culture from Early Iron Age Urnfields in Denmark

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